Patricio Henriquez is a Quebec based filmmaker,[1][2] who is a partner with Robert Cornellier and Raymonde Provencher in the Macumba Films documentary studio.[3]
Henriquez grew up and trained in filmmaking in Chile, leaving the country after Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende.
In 1999, The Last Stand of Salvador Allende won the award for Best History Documentary at the 1999 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival.[4] In 2000, he won the award for Best Political Documentary for Images of a Dictatorship,[5] which was also the winner of the 2000 M. Joan Chalmers Documentarian Award for Film and Video.[6]
Henriquez's film Uyghurs: Prisoners of the Absurd had its world premiere on October 10, 2014, at the Festival du nouveau cinema.[7] The film, about the 22 Uyghur captives in Guantanamo, is his third related to controversial US policies on holding civilians, for years, in extrajudicial detention. Rushan Abbas, a refugee herself, who had become a US citizen and successful in business, and had agreed to go to Guantanamo to serve as a translator, was one of the experts interviewed in the film told the Montreal Gazette why she agreed to be in Henriquez's film when she had declined other invitations.
“When I met Patricio, I saw that not only is he very passionate and a great director, but when I heard about his background, where he came from, I just had an immediate connection with him. He was a refugee himself. He came from another country because he was looking for a better life … a safe life actually. Why am I in America? Why were these people out of China? It just clicked right away. So I wanted to support this all the way.”[7]
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Brendan Kelly (2014-10-09). "Film chronicles the fate of the Uyghurs in Guantánamo". Montreal Gazette. Archived from the original on 2014-10-16. Henríquez's latest film, Uyghurs: Prisoners of the Absurd, chronicles the fascinating and oh-so-disturbing tale of the 22 members of China's Muslim Uyghur minority who were held at Guantánamo for more than a decade. They were never convicted of any crime and all indications are that they had nothing to do with any terrorist organization.